I've started thinking differently as a result of reading this hugely ambitious first novel. I am thinking differently about the nature of things: morality, wealth, love, ambition, personal motives. Our watchful and nameless protagonist is, like Nick Carraway, more of an observer than a participant, except that she is a pawn in a complicated familial chess match, used by her maddeningly narcissistic richer-than-God mother, various indifferent father figures and predatory would-be lovers all to gain advantage over each other. Raised under such circumstances, she learns much about the nature of trust without ever experiencing its comforts herself. Ozick offers many literary and mythological illusions, symbolism both slippery and obtrusive, rambling and brilliant observations as well as a keen wit and wry cynicism. There are so many ideas expressed in this novel, so obliquely and amorphously, on such weighty subjects that I do not feel entirely qualified to review it properly. A student of classical literature, philosophy and religion would do better. If LT is any indication, not enough people are reading this book. I've never read anything like it.

“Everthing is mine,” said gold.“Everthing is mine,” said iron.“I’ll buy everthing,” said gold.“I’ll take everything,” said iron.-Alexarndr Pushkin

Offer the resourceful man one of two legacies:A mammoth trust fund by inheritance of wealth,or a miniscule fund of trust by inheritance ofnature; and he will choose the one which leastinhibits venturesomeness.-from the unpublished aphorisms Of Enoch Vand

Dedication

To My Mother and Father

First words

After the exercises I stood in the muddy field (it had rained at dawn) and felt the dark wool of my gown lap up the heat and din of noon, and at that instant, while the graduates ran with cries towards asterisks of waiting parents and the sun hung like an animal's tongue from a sickened blue maw, I heard the last stray call from a bugle-single, lost, unconnected- and in one moment I grew suddenly old.

Quotations

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Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Publisher series

Original language

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References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

Money and conscience are at the heart of Cynthia Ozick's masterly first novel, narrated by a nameless young woman and set in the private world of wealthy New York, the dire landscape of postwar Europe, and the mythical groves of a Shakespearean isle. Beginning in the 1930s and extending through four decades, Trust is an epic tale of the narrator's quest for her elusive father, a scandalous figure whom she has never known. In a provocative afterword, Ozick reflects on how she came to write the novel and discusses the cultural shift in the nature of literary ambition in the years since.